A Control-Theoretic Approach to Adaptive Video Streaming in Dense Wireless Networks

摘要

Recently, the way people consume video content has been undergoing a dramaticchange. Plain TV sets, that have been the center of home entertainment for along time, are losing grounds to Hybrid TV's, PC's, game consoles, and, morerecently, mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. The new predominantparadigm is: watch what I want, when I want, and where I want. The challenges of this shift are manifold. On the one hand, broadcasttechnologies such as DVB-T/C/S need to be extended or replaced by mechanismssupporting asynchronous viewing, such as IPTV and video streaming overbest-effort networks, while remaining scalable to millions of users. On theother hand, the dramatic increase of wireless data traffic begins to stretchthe capabilities of the existing wireless infrastructure to its limits.Finally, there is a challenge to video streaming technologies to cope with ahigh heterogeneity of end-user devices and dynamically changing networkconditions, in particular in wireless and mobile networks. In the present work, our goal is to design an efficient system that supportsa high number of unicast streaming sessions in a dense wireless access network.We address this goal by jointly considering the two problems of wirelesstransmission scheduling and video quality adaptation, using techniques inspiredby the robustness and simplicity of Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID)controllers. We show that the control-theoretic approach allows to efficientlyutilize available wireless resources, providing high Quality of Experience(QoE) to a large number of users.